Recent publications

Payments for environmental services (PES) programmes have been widely promoted over the last few decades in many developing countries. Improving the livelihoods of environmental services (ES) suppliers is not only seen as a side benefit but is often considered a prerequisite for the viability of PES. Yet, the ability to draw ‘overview lessons’ over the impacts of PES on livelihoods from literature review studies remains limited.

This study conducted a cross-sectional survey of 8174 micro, small and medium enterprises from ten major urban areas in Ethiopia to study the determinants of the enterprises’ adoption of energy efficiency practices and technologies. For identification, we rely on a generalized ordered probit model. The findings reveal that, as the size of the enterprise becomes larger, it is more likely the enterprise will undertake energy efficient practices and technologies.

This study analyses the impact of intensity of tillage on wheat productivity and risk exposure using panel household-plot level data from Ethiopia. In order to control for selection bias, it estimates a flexible moment-based production function using an endogenous switching regression treatment effects model. The result shows that tillage has a complementary impact on productivity and risk exposure.

Policy makers and utility managers can use a variety of tariff structures to calculate customers’ bills for water and sanitation services, ranging from a simple flat monthly fee to complicated multipart tariffs with seasonal pricing based on metered water use. This paper examines the performance of alternative tariff structures for water and wastewater services in Nairobi, Kenya.

The use of small-scale off-grid renewable energy for rural electrification is now seen as one sustainable energy solution. The expectations from such small-scale investment include meeting basic household energy needs and thereby improving some aspects of household welfare. However, these stated benefits remain largely hypothetical because there are data and methodological challenges in existing literature attempting to isolate such impacts. This paper uses field data from micro hydro schemes in Kenya and a propensity score matching technique to demonstrate such an impact.

In this paper, we identify economic implications of the pressure to share resources within a social network. Through a set of field experiments in rural Tanzania we randomly increased the expected harvest of the treatment group by the assignment of an improved and much more productive variety of maize.

The Gram-Charlier Expansion (GCE) of the Gaussian density under GARCH framework has been widely used to model the conditional dynamic higher moments. Compared with other generalized distributions, GARCH-GCE models describe the dynamic equations of conditional skewness and kurtosis in a more direct way. While GCE function is not always positive, it is often squared and normalized in empirical studies. However, little attention has been paid to the fact that the higher moments of squared-GCE function are different from the original GCE function.

We propose a closed-form pricing formula for the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (CBOE VIX) futures based on the classic discrete-time Heston–Nandi GARCH model. The parameters are estimated using several sets of data, including the S&P 500 returns, the CBOE VIX, VIX futures prices and combinations of these data sources. Based on the resulting empirical pricing performances, we recommend the use of both VIX and VIX futures prices for a joint estimation of model parameters.

The recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform in China has started the process of devolving forest management rights from village collectives to households since 2003. In this paper, we study the impact of the reform on rural energy consumption. Devolving forest tenure improves farmers' access to forest products on their newly acquired forestland, and is therefore expected to increase farmers' fuelwood consumption. The reform also allows farmers to adopt some revenue-enhancing forest technologies which may lead to energy switching in farmer households.

Does public transportation reduce vehicle congestion? Using a regression-discontinuity framework, we examine the effect of six subway openings on short-run congestion in Beijing between 2009 and 2015. We find that vehicle congestion drops sharply immediately after new subway openings. In our central specification, each of the subway openings decreased delay times by an average of 15% in the short run over the city of Beijing.